416 EVENING DISCOURSES. 



EVENING DISCOURSES. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11. 



The Palace of Minos and the Prehistoric Civilisation of Crete. 

 By Sir Arthur Evans, F.R.S. 



Civilisation might perhaps be defined as a social condition inlierited from 

 long experience of life in an ordered iState. Our own civilisation was in a 

 principal degree taken over from the Greco-Roman. It came in a direct line 

 from Ancient Greece, together with elements taken as we know from Semitic 

 and other Oriental sources. But how did the highly developed civilisation of 

 Ancient Greece itself, on which our own is based, come into being? Was it 

 indeed an exception to all rules, a kind of Enfant de Miracle '! Such till lately 

 was the tacitly accepted view. A rude shock to this complacent assumption was 

 indeed given by Schliemann'e discoveries at Mycenae, but even the finest of these 

 were explained away as due to ' oriental ' derivation. Still, the earliest traditions 

 of Greece were not at fault on the matter. They pointed consistently to Crete 

 for the source of Greek civilisation. There Minos had founded his great sea 

 Empire, there in ' broad Knossos ' his craftsman Daedalos had built him a 

 marvellous palace. There, on the sacred mountain from the hands of its God — 

 like Moses — ^he had received the law. The other mythical stories are well known. 

 The palace became a Labyrinth, where dwelt the Minotaur, half man half bull 

 and devoured the captive children, till Queen Ariadne — in whom an old Cretan 

 Goddess is thinly disguised — supplied the clue to her champion, Theseus, who 

 slew the monster and delivered his victims. 



Well, it has nearly all come true. Visiting the island first in 1895, and the 

 subsequent year, I made preliminary investigations with a view of attacking the 

 problem of its prehistory. At Knossos itself — the fabled site of the ' Palace of 

 Minos ' — where an early wall and magazine had already come to light, I obtained 

 on the spot a variety of evidence — including the actual indication of a prehistoric 

 system of writing — which encouraged me to make every possible effort to carry 

 out excavation there. But, though in the year of this first visit I secured the 

 actual proprietorship of a part of the site, the difficulties of the times were such 

 that it was not till 1900 that it was possible to begin excavation there. Its results 

 have shown that the old tradition was essentially true. In successive years the 

 spade brought out the remains of a great palace, rich beyond all expectation in 

 treasures of art and culture — including whole archives of written documents — and 

 unfolding in fact an early European civilisation going back two thousand years 

 before that of Hellas. The immense amount of materials brought to light has 

 made it impossible to publish any full account of the discoveries. Supplementary 

 researches made in il913 put me at last in the position to attempt a general 

 view of the results in a collective work on the ' Palace of Minos,' but the diffi- 

 culties caused by the War have delayed its publication, and it is as much as I can 

 hope to bring out the first volume before the end of this year. 



The materials brought out at Knossos have been supplemented by other rich 

 finds made by my colleagues of the British School at Athens and of the Italian 

 Mission, in various parts of the island. A whole new vista of early civilisation 

 has opened out, involving an entirely new classification as a preliminary to its 

 scientific treatment. At a former meeting of the Association I had the honour of 



